


and end again in flames at last

by franticallywhisperedstories



Category: Power Rangers, Power Rangers (2017)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Immortality, minor suicidal idealations, something akin to a slow-burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-20
Updated: 2017-10-01
Packaged: 2018-12-04 11:08:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11553927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/franticallywhisperedstories/pseuds/franticallywhisperedstories
Summary: Being a Power Ranger means staying. No matter what.(Humanity colonizes space. A group of seventeen-year-old superheroes deal with isolation, dad jokes, and their crippling immortality by taking a long road trip.)





	1. watching it go up out front on the lawn

**Author's Note:**

> title from the mountain goats' luna!

The front yard is lit with the dim glow of people leaving.

Trini watches from the roof, digging her nails under the shingles and holding on as tight as she can, like the house is going to pull its roots from the ground and fly off in a spray of fire and smoke. Like she’s the only thing keeping it here when it wants so badly to go.

She counts the ships under her breath, _nineteen, twenty, twenty-one._ They vary in size. Some look like they lifted off from the next neighborhood over, hot white like shooting stars. The grass rustles in a breeze that she can’t feel. The night is quieter than it has any right to be.

She isn’t angry at them, of course she isn’t. It’s always been like this, people have always been picking each other apart and pushing off and reaching to the sky. They evolved into a species struck with insatiable wanderlust, and everyone knew it would end like this.

She waits until the ships are just part of the scenery, just another faraway thing to make wishes on, before she crawls to the open window and drops to the ground. There’s an air of finality about it, turning her back at long last on the people she swore to protect so long ago. It’s like breaking a contract, shaking hands. Saying _keep in touch,_ even though you know they won’t.

She closes the window and turns out the light. She climbs into bed exhausted, but sleep doesn’t come. She memorizes the cracks on the ceiling and wonders how long she can call this _home._

* * *

 

Kim and Zach are arguing when she comes downstairs, falling silent abruptly when they see her. Trini ignores them and shuffles towards the kitchen for some much-needed coffee.

“Hey,” Zach says, and there’s a kindness underneath his words that she’ll never quite get used to. “Sleep okay?”

She grunts neutrally. She doubts anyone slept last night, caught up in the future that left them behind. The coffee tastes burnt, which means that Kim brewed it, which means that she was up early.

Which means that she’s worried, and Trini can’t blame her. They can act like teenagers all they want, pretending they don’t care about anything, but when it comes down to it they’re old, anxious, and trying to preserve something that doesn’t want to be saved.

“Zach and I were discussing next steps,” Kim says brightly, hand clenched around the table until her knuckles turn white. “We- we think a meeting is in order.”

Trini examines the bottom of her mug with great interest. “Yeah,” she says, because she doesn’t trust herself to say anything else. She isn’t looking forward to this.

“What the hell are we meeting about?” Zach says. His voice is calm, but his eyes flash. Three hundred years, and they’re still tearing themselves apart. It’s kind of sad. “We’re old news, Kim. They don’t need us anymore.”

“There are still _life forms on this planet-,”_ and that’s Trini’s cue. Let Jason or Billy de-escalate this fight. She’s too tired to deal with these two short-fused bombs, even if they are pretty much her favorite people in the world.

Trini goes outside, and the cold surprises her. She squeezes her mug so tight that hairline cracks weave their way up the plaster. She looks at it in despair. Dammit, that’s the sixth one in the past two months, and now they _can’t get any more because everyone is fucking gone._

Suddenly furious, she slings the mug at the ground, watching it splinter with a horrible satisfaction. Shitty coffee spills across the sidewalk and ebbs into the cracks. She sits down and puts her head in her hands until she stops shaking, which takes longer than it should. She breathes through the pocket of air in her folded arms. Wind whips her hair across her face and she really should cut it more often, it’s not like she’s been busy.

God, she’s just so _sick_ of this charade, of arguing and competing and worrying their damn heads off. And it all came down to nothing, didn’t it? She’s still sitting amongst the shards of a coffee mug, Kim and Zach are still shouting just inside about what to do next. And everyone left anyway, except for five people who stayed to protect what remained of Earth.

It’s too normal of a morning for all this. It’s cold and the coffee is bad and there are birds somewhere with their fucking incessant singing that she can’t quite pinpoint. She half expects to go inside and switch on the net and see perky news anchors giving the morning report, the weather forecasts and all the bad shit that happened overnight, except they packed all their stupid colorful clothes and boarded the nearest ship and blasted into the exosphere.

When a hand settles between her shoulder blades, she’s been expecting it for a while. She doesn’t flinch.

“Hi, Jason,” she says. Her voice is muffled by her sleeve.

He doesn’t say anything, just shifts until he’s sitting next to her. He keeps his hand on her back, and she’s privately glad. It’s warm and gentle and full of life, all the things she needs right now.

They sit like that, quiet and contemplative. People left their autos lining the streets, jamming up driveways. Some are still in public parking spaces with long-overdue meters. Part of her wants to go around and key every single one. She’ll talk to Zach about it later, he’ll probably be down.

“It’s going to be okay, you know,” he says and she bites back a laugh because when did he become such a _leader?_ “We’ll figure something out.”

She lifts her head, squinting at the mostly-dead grass. “You really believe that, Scott?”

“I do,” he says. He presses his hand down a little harder, as if to chastise her.

She scratches her leg, digging her fingernails in so it stings just a little bit. “It’s gonna be pretty hard.”

“Yeah,” he says. There’s something grim in his eyes, like the first battle against Rita when they’d all pretty much figured out that they were going to die painful, fiery deaths.

They survived. They survived and survived and _survived_ until it was almost the punchline of one of Zach’s shitty jokes.

“There are going to be a lot of screw-ups,” she says, gesturing to the mosaic of porcelain surrounding them.

“What- _oh,”_ he says, seeing it for the first time. “I- it’s okay, Trini. We have too many mugs anyway.”

“It was yours,” she says glumly. From now on, she’ll check the color of the smashing thing before she smashes it. Promise.

“I don’t really drink coffee or tea,” he says. “Don’t worry about it. Think you’re ready for the meeting?”

“Yeah,” she says. A sharp prickle of guilt is making its way down her spine. She’s being stupid and childish. Throwing a tantrum isn’t helping anything. “Go ahead, man. I’m just gonna clean this up.”

He watches her for a second longer before disappearing into the house. If she squints, she can see Kim whispering to Billy in the kitchen, perched on the counter, and she can imagine Zach muttering something to Jason as he walks in, probably along the lines of _how’s Crazy Girl?_

She scoops the shards into one hand, trying not to look at them. They’re the color of blood, hard white around the edges. Congealed into something sticky and unrepentant.

She shoves it all into her pockets, another addition to her list of Things to Deal with Later. The sky is overcast now, holding no trace of the activity from last night. She wonders if humanity has reached the stars yet. She wonders if people are tired and homesick and want to come back.

She wonders if they ever will.

It feels like a long time that she stands there, watching the horizon, but in reality it’s only about three minutes before she joins the others at the long kitchen table, refusing to meet anyone’s eyes. It hurts, the tension in the room. They’re all waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

“So,” Zach says, “what now?”

All eyes turn to Jason, who shrinks away. Trini wouldn’t like to be in his shoes, leader of a team with no evident purpose.

“We keep going, right?” Kim says. “We’re the Power Rangers. We can’t just give up on this planet.”

“Everyone else did,” Trini mumbles, but she doesn’t think that anyone hears her.

“There should still be a Zeo Crystal,” Billy says. “I mean, there’s still life, so there’s still a Crystal.”

“And it’s still in danger,” Jason says. He seems to have gained some of his confidence back. “Our job wasn’t just about protecting the people. It was about protecting the planet.”

This is Jason’s element. He stands up, pushing his chair back with a tired screech of wood on wood. If their lives were a movie, the instrumental would swell.

“As long as there is a planet to protect,” he continues, “we will protect it.”

“What if we die?” Zach says. It’s funny how they all used to tiptoe around things like that. You go long enough not dying and it doesn’t scare you anymore. “We can’t pass on the coins.”

Kim’s lips quirk upwards (not that Trini’s looking at her lips, okay, it’s just- it’s a natural thing to notice). “Sure we can,” she says. “Let some scavenging critters find them.”

Trini almost wants to cry in relief. It’s fine, it’s _fine,_ of course it is. “I personally would welcome our new team of squirrels, pigeons, and maybe a lizard.”

“The lizard’s Trini,” Zach stage-whispers to Billy, who laughs into his fist.

She can’t even bring herself to punch him, she’s so happy that they’re still a team, still a family.

“Zach’s point still stands,” Jason says with no small amount of regret. “If we die, the Power Rangers are gone. We need to be prepared to make that sacrifice.”

Trini remembers when _sacrifice_ meant dying instead of living. It’s been a long six hundred years.

“We’re not even sure we _can_ die,” Kim reminds them. “It’s never happened before.”

“Um,” Billy says politely, raising a hand.

“You don’t count,” Zach says. “You came back.”

“I’d say it counts,” Billy says. “It’s closer than you ever got.”

Zach laughs. “You got a point,” he concedes.

“Okay,” Jason says, “let’s- let’s focus. We still have a purpose and we’re going to serve that purpose.”

Trini reaches into her pocket and fidgets with a shard of porcelain. It scrapes against her fingertip. Her hand comes out bloody and she sucks on it gently. She can still bleed, at least. That small humanity has yet to be taken away.

There’s quiet for a little while. Sometimes she wishes they could age, could fear death, could mature just a little bit. That they weren’t stuck in this summery stagnation, reaching for an adulthood they’ll never find. Seventeen is a shitty age to be.

“We should talk to Zordon,” Kim says. “He’ll know what to do.”

A relieved murmur of assent rises through the room. Trini has been truly, completely indebted to Wall Dad three times. Once when he distracted Alpha-5 from asking what “Netflix and chill” meant, once after Trini attended her little brother’s funeral and he gave some stunningly good advice about outliving everyone you know, and now that everyone’s rushed off to explore new worlds and he’s the only actual adult left in this one.

“Wait,” Zach says. He’s staring into his tea like it’ll give him instructions. “So, we’re in agreement? We stay and guard whatever’s left?”

Trini can’t tell if he’s still arguing or not. Sometimes it’s a little bit of both. “What else are we gonna do?”

Jason flashes her a rare, brilliant smile. “Let’s make the best of this,” he says and _damn_ that boy was born to be a motivational speaker.

“All right!” Billy says. “Put your hands in the middle, guys, come on.”

Kim laughs and places her hand on top of his. Then it’s Jason, then Zach, and finally Trini, with her chipped yellow nails that Kim paints every two months, like clockwork.

“Three!” Billy yells, infectious in his enthusiasm time after time. “Two! One!”

They scream, “Power Rangers!” and break apart with enough force to bring the walls of this tiny house down. Someone almost always falls out of their chair. This time it’s Kim, laughing into the questionably clean tile.

They’re young, they’ve always been so young and so old and they fill up every space they’re put in, even an entire fucking planet if they have to. They’re alive, and sometimes that isn’t such a bad thing.


	2. stay on my guard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zordon and the team have a conversation. Trini and Kim have a conversation. Billy and Trini have a conversation. Zach and Jason take a long nap.

After a row of apartments sprung up on their beloved mountain, Alpha-5 and Billy rigged up a teleporter so they could make it down to the Pit without getting their hair wet. It’s convenient and small in the way that most things are, nowadays.

Trini _hates_ it.

This time, no discussion necessary, they pile into the minivan. Trini calls shotgun and Zack whines that it’s _no fair, can you even see over the dashboard?_ Jason drives and Trini pretends that she can’t see his knuckles turning blotchy white as he grips the wheel. She kicks her feet up and tries to think of some game or conversation that’ll keep Kim, Billy and Zach from looking out the windows so much.

They park outside the quarry and it feels like the first day, racing each other up the side of the mountain and shrieking into the wind as they leap across the canyon, finding unsteady footholds and watching rock tumble into the darkness below.

It feels good to scream again.

Zach does a cannonball into the water because he’s a drama queen. Kim, not to be outdone, executes a perfect swan dive that shows off her (very nice) arms. Jason attempts something cool and fancy, but it turns into a belly flop. His yelp of pain can be heard forty feet up. Billy glances over the side, brow furrowed in concern. Trini’s laughing her ass off. She takes a running leap, and it feels like she’s flying.

The water rushes in around her ears, squeezing into her closed eyes and turning her into something formless, graceful. She feels loose, free, going as deep as she can into the soundless dark before pushing off and surfacing in a great burst, spraying Zach and Jason with water. She’s laughing, her hair is wet and split. She doesn’t glow yellow, not anymore, but she still feels sunlight swirling inside her.

Nobody says anything for a while, floating there in the almost-black, watching each other from the pinprick of light that feels far enough away to ignore for now. The water is smooth, cool. They’re all grinning, all happy, or something passing for it.

They’ll always be teenagers. Always always.

Billy goes under first, drawing a deep breath even though the coins feed hungry veins if necessary. Zach is next, taking care to skim his fingers across the surface. She doesn’t watch them all disappear, but she knows they belong here. Powerful, strong. In this chasm, they are the gods they were always meant to be.

Alpha-5 welcomes them as they enter, waving his staticky fingers. He asks, “How goes it?” in a voice that _knows,_ knows all the shit that’s happened since they last came, too long ago, really. Maybe he does, maybe he sees Trini’s split knuckles and hears Zach crying when he thinks everyone else is asleep, just like the rest of them. Alpha sees right through them, always has. Zordon leads, but Alpha is the master.

Billy offers a fistbump, which Alpha happily accepts. They drip water across the stone, a tinny, consistent beat. Zordon buzzes to life, shifting across the wall and watching them with pixelated eyes.

Kim heaves herself onto a ledge and sits criss-cross applesauce, fingers folded like she’s in elementary school and trying to suck up to the teacher except Kim has probably never sucked up to anyone in her whole life. That girl has her own agenda.

“So,” she says, brisk and calm. “What do we do?”

“What do you mean?” Zordon asks, although he doesn’t sound like he’s really asking. He’s doing that thing he does, that annoying thing where he knows the answer but he doesn’t think they do.

Trini leans next to Kim, crosses her arms. “I know you’ve dealt with the apocalypse twelve times over, but this is new territory for us.”

“I wouldn’t call this an apocalypse,” Billy protests. “It’s more of an exodus.”

Zordon still breathes, even though he’s been dead for something like two thousand years. Sometimes, Trini watches his little pegs ripple, even and gentle, like the rise and fall of a sleeping chest. Life has a funny way of marching on in ways you wouldn’t expect.

“Oh, excuse me,” he says. “I must have something wrong with my hearing. Alpha, check the microphones, please?”

The best thing to do when Zordon is trying to make a joke is just to wait it out. Alpha whirs and spins before calling, “Affirmative,” and Zordon laughs, a weird, syncopated sound.

“Really,” he says. “Because I thought I heard the mighty morphing Power Rangers asking for _my_ help.”

“We do that pretty frequently, actually,” Billy says. “I know we’re prideful, but we come to you for advice on a number of things.”

“I know,” Zordon says. “I was attempting a joke.” He shoots this last part towards Trini and Kim, who wear matching expressions of stoic disapproval.

Jason pushes a mat of drying hair out of his face. “Please, Zordon. We’ve protected humanity for more than half a millennium, and now they’re all gone. We don’t know how to start over.”

Trini catches Zordon’s eye and knows immediately that he can’t help them. He’s dealt with deaths and ruins and wars, but he can’t comprehend migration. He sacrificed his death, a concept that Trini has started to appreciate more and more, to ensure the protection of this planet, and he can’t understand why anyone would want to leave it.

She glances to Kim on her left and is met with grim understanding. She’s come to the same conclusion, and they’re just waiting for the gavel to drop.

“You don’t start over,” Zordon says. “You can’t, not completely. You don’t need to rebuild. You must take what’s left and make it yours.”

Trini thinks about the van parked outside the quarry, still staying inside the damn lines. She thinks about running, diving into the water, screaming like it’s more a beginning than an ending.

They’ve been taking what’s left and making it theirs forever.

Zach scratches the back of his sweaty neck. “Yeah, but how do we do that?”

“We don’t plan,” Trini says. “We just stay here and try to enjoy the rest of our quasi-immortal lives.”

Kim nods. “Fight bad guys wherever they pop up.”

“We should probably figure out a food situation,” Jason says, and he’s right. They don’t need to eat, but you try telling a group of teenagers in total control of their living situation not to pig out all the time. Trini tries to imagine a life without everything bagels and comes up empty.

Everyone’s a little quieter after that, after figuring out that there isn’t really much they can do. Trini hates waiting, waiting for her parents to decide that this town isn’t good enough, waiting for people to learn her name at a new school, waiting for the world to require saving again. It’s never come naturally to her, but she sure as hell has a better deal now than she used to, and citizens are just kind of inconveniences after a while anyway if you can’t interact with them for fear of someone figuring out that you don’t age, and _fuck_ she’s going to miss it, isn’t she.

She doesn’t want to miss it.

They train for a good five hours. Every once in a while, someone seems to remember what they’re dealing with and attacks with a renewed vigor. Zordon keeps his ancient puns to himself. Alpha circles them like a coach despite the fact that they surpassed a level that can be taught a while ago.

Trini was almost a hundred twenty four, still a short high schooler with a messy undercut, when she and Kim first gathered the courage to ask what the fuck was going on. Nowadays, she doesn’t really know what she was afraid of, which answer seemed preferable at the time. She didn’t want to die back then, a desire that surpassed a lot of other things.

She remembers asking Zordon if other Power Rangers lived forever. It was a childish question, one her brothers might have asked before they became optometrists and math teachers, waving around their rubbery Power Rangers figurines and arguing over which was best.

He’d told her that no, they didn’t. He told them not to get cocky, and not to get reckless. He told them that it was unheard of for anyone, even superheroes, to stay teenagers forever. He said he was trying to tell what kept them from aging and it was probably something supernatural and ominous. He said he thought he was pretty close to figuring it out.

Zordon’s been pretty close to figuring it out for the better part of two hundred years.

Time passes in a weird way when you genuinely have no idea how much of it you have left. Sure, most people can’t predict when they’ll die, but they can estimate that they’ll have about eighty years, less if they do dangerous things or have a tendency towards illness, more if they eat their greens and do calisthenics in the mornings. When you could die tomorrow for seemingly no reason or live until the sun implodes for even less reason, centuries stretch taut like rubber bands. Trini’s just waiting for the snap.

* * *

 

Usually, they train until someone passes out from exhaustion or they get bored, and it’s anyone’s guess which will come first. Today, Trini’s feeling cooped up, so she knocks Zach lightly on the side of the head and declares that they’re done and she’s going to go sightseeing if anyone wants to join her.

Kim says something about saving the tourism for later, when they’re actually bored out of their skulls and battling loneliness, but Trini’s never been a special-occasion kind of girl so she ignores it. She walks out in something resembling a huff and times herself to see how quickly she can scale the cliff face to get out. She manages twenty-two seconds, which is good, but doesn’t quite beat Billy’s record of nineteen.

Zach catches up to her, damn near tackles her to the ground, and then Jason and Billy. Kim waits until they’re buckling into the van to show up, just to get them antsy because that’s the kind of person she is. She raps on the passenger-side window, right above Trini’s forehead, and grins like a stupid seventeen-year-old. Trini gives her the finger, and Kim’s laughter follows her into the car.

They stop to raid a convenience store twenty minutes into what Zach has already dubbed the Most Epic Road Trip of All Time (like they’ll ever top the time in 2136 when they started in Sacramento and ended, inexplicably, in Australia). They fill the car with cheap, sugary snack cakes (some things never change, for which Trini is incredibly grateful), handheld monitors stocked with incredibly lame games, and a bumper sticker that reads I LEFT MY HEART IN ANGEL GROVE because none of them can argue with that. Jason and Zach play a ridiculous, screech-filled game of tag through the aisles, Billy breaks into the register so he can make it rain on the dirty tile, and Trini and Kim choose soft drinks.

Kim’s cheeks are pink next to the wall-to-wall coolers. She rolls little cans between her hands, blowing on them to get rid of the beads of sweat. Every so often, she tosses something to Trini to test her reflexes, like that game isn’t dead by now.

Trini ignores her for the most part. She can be a child too, she doesn’t have to be the mature one all the time. She can sulk and pout and throw a fucking tantrum if she wants. If they’re forced into three hundred years of awkward, idiotic teenagery, she’s damn well going to act like one. She’ll be petty, she’ll be quiet, and she won’t notice the way Kim’s eyes keep darting to her, a trace of secret smile on her lips, an inside joke. They’re not doing this again, okay, they’re _not._

They load back into the car. Zach rolls the window all the way down and hangs his head out, like a dog, yelling indistinct things into the east wind. Jason spends eighteen minutes trying to figure out how to blast his (indescribably old) music before giving up and making Billy pull over so he can do it. Trini makes up word games that don’t make sense and ropes everyone into playing them. Occasionally, they stop at empty fields just to frolic (sometimes, you just need to fucking frolic, okay?)

It’s dark by eight and Jason, Zach, and Kim are fast asleep, sprawled over each other in a pile and disgustingly adorable. Billy’s gotten into the stage of most plans he goes along with where he starts nervously giggling and whispering, “This was a terrible idea!” in a very excited voice, like a twelve-year-old girl pranking her friend’s older brother at a slumber party. Trini stares out the window so he can’t see her lip-syncing to Jason’s (indescribably old) music. The stars are so spread out and quiet, watching with something akin to disapproval. There are people up there, never quite bright enough to make an imprint.

At ten-fifteen, Trini says, “Dude, you want me to drive for a little while so you can take a nap?”

Billy taps a fingernail against the wheel, a dull metronome. “Trini, we don’t need to sleep.”

Trini jerks her head to the backseat. “They’re clearly enjoying themselves.”

He frowns. Lines crease his forehead, the wrinkles of an ancient child. “Yes, but I- I don’t necessarily find sleep enjoyable.”

Nightmares, okay. After all the shit they’ve seen, it’s amazing that any of them get any rest at all. Trini can deal with nightmares.

“Whatever you want,” she says, “but if I could drive for a bit anyway, I’d really like that.”

He brightens. “Of course! Let me just find a place to pull over.”

She wants to point out that the whole road is a place to pull over, but she likes talking to Billy and driving with Billy and sitting in companionable silence with Billy, so she doesn’t. He keeps going, staying very neatly within the lines, although he is going three miles per hour above the speed limit.

Eventually, he does stop, right in the middle of the road, which delights Trini to no end. He gets out and Trini does too. Without really discussing it, they end up sitting in the hood with the headlights still burning into the backs of their legs. The night is full, all around them. They sit like that, listening to crickets screech and frogs sing, a plea that won’t ever be heard.

“It really sucks, how everyone left,” Billy says. He plays with a loose thread on his shirt. Green, because it only took about thirty years for them to get tired of the whole color-coding thing. “Just like that.”

“Just like that,” Trini agrees, even though it wasn’t nearly that sudden. This whole colonization thing had been in the works for a pretty long time before liftoff. Most of the people who left had grown up with it, with skeletal rockets and star maps more intricate than anything Trini could have ever dreamed of. It’s weird to think about, so she doesn’t.

“Everything we know is gone,” Billy continues. His legs swing silently, leaving bizarre shadows on the asphalt.

Trini gets kind of philosophical after dark. “Everything we know has been gone a long time, Billy.”

He sighs, a deep sigh that must come from every part of him. He leans against her shoulder, warm skin and sweat against her hoodie. It’s nice to have a tangible reminder that you aren’t completely alone, just more alone than pretty much anyone ever has been in all of history, no biggie.

Jason’s (indescribably old) playlist switches to something a little more upbeat, with a little more drum involved.

“I miss country music,” Billy says mournfully.

Trini stares into the sky, a grim smile tugging at her lips. That’s it, that’s just it, they’re just five fucking messes who can’t leave and can’t pretend to be human anymore and miss country music.

She leans back against the windshield and makes a thousand belated wishes to the stars, too far away to possibly be listening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> where do you even find a mentor like zordon? at the wallmart?


	3. rage on, all gone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> fields and aliens and girls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i'm almost definitely not continuing this story, and i doubt anyone's still reading it, but i found enough to make one more chapter on my computer that i wrote before i lost interest, so why not.

Trini’s been driving for almost three hours before Kim wakes up, making a big deal of stretching and hitting Jason in the face. Trini watches her in the rearview mirror, lit sporadically by neon signs that no one thought to take down.

“Hey,” Kim unbuckles her seatbelt and leans forward, smiling tiredly. “Having fun?”

Billy’s curled up beside her, face pressed into the window in a way that will undoubtedly be sore in the morning. Trini is having fun, in a weird kind of way.

She’s always done okay with solitude.

She makes a noncommittal noise and ignores her heartbeat picking up. Why do they even still have heartbeats, they don’t need to eat or sleep or even breathe anymore. Trini thinks about her bloodstream, rushing to provide unnecessary benefits to exhausted cells. Shit, she got philosophical again, this always happens.

“Sometimes I think that this is the worst thing that could ever happen to someone,” Kim says. She’s looking at the moon through the sunroof, waxing gibbous or something like that. Trini never bothered to learn. “Like, the worst kind of punishment.”

There’s something deeply conversational about the way she says it that sets Trini on edge. “Whoever said that hell is other people didn’t know what he was talking about, huh?”

“Exactly.” Kim crawls closer and perches on the center console in a way that cannot be comfortable. She sits like a cat or an anxious bird. She leans against the headrest of Billy’s seat and threads an arm around it to keep upright. “He didn’t have a fucking clue.”

Trini used to think that things were awkward between her and Kim, and then she remembered that she’d spent three hundred years with pretty much only four other people and they’re probably closer than any other human beings on the planet. Still, awkwardness isn’t something you can outlive. She’s learned that the hard way.

Kim distracts her, pointing down one side of a fork in the road. “Oh no, don’t go that way.”

“Why not?” Trini says, immediately going that way just because she feels like being contrary.

“There’s a graveyard,” Kim says. “Right up ahead, there.”

Trini laughs. “Better hold your breath, Hart, or the ghosts will come and take it away!” She’s suddenly reminded of long car trips as a little kid, playing bingo and trying to make her brothers cry.

Kim scoffs. “As if I couldn’t take a ghost.” She runs her fingers down the soft velvet of the seat, careful not to disturb Billy. “No, I just don’t like the idea of them. All those people, left behind.”

Trini slows down. They pass the graveyard, and aren’t forced to do battle with any ghosts, which is actually kind of disappointing. “We were left behind too.”

Kim stares straight ahead, like the road is her future and she needs to see beyond the horizon. “But it wasn’t personal, you know?”

Trini does, and she hates it. Nobody really abandoned them, because nobody cared about them enough for it to count. It wasn’t personal, it was never personal. Humanity just moved on without them, and it leaves such a bitter taste in her mouth.

“Graveyards, though,” Kim continues. “They’re filled with parents and children and siblings and lovers of people who are now rushing off for a different solar system. Some of them might be astrophysicists or historians, who almost made it to like, the biggest thing that’s ever happened to us, and then fell short. By just a couple of years.”

Trini keeps her eyes on the road and her hands on the wheel, even though everything in her itches to look at Kim, just once, those eyes and that ever-choppy haircut. That little spark of rebellion, that almost-adulthood.

She doesn’t really think of anything as history. Stuff happens, stuff happens all the damn time. So what if you miss it? Trini basically napped through World War V.

People who want to see everything should trade places with her, guess how long before they’re begging to be blind.

“I guess it is pretty sad,” she says. “But there were always going to people who missed it. Even if it happened a few years earlier.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to us,” Kim says, “but it would’ve made a pretty big one to those people.” She jerks her head out the window, even though the graveyard is long in their dust.

Trini just nods. She doesn’t know how to talk about this stuff. She waits four minutes to ascertain that the conversation has dropped before reaching over to turn up Jason’s (indescribably old) music.

“Shit, I haven’t heard that in ages,” Kim says. She closes her eyes like she’s remembering dancing to it, with the shimmering veneer all memories have. “God, how’d he even find it?”

“Our fearless leader works in mysterious ways,” Trini says. Kim laughs and dammit if it doesn’t hurt, loving her like that, chaotic and stifling and so fucking eternal.

The song changes and Kim sits up straighter. Trini can feel her excited energy. She doesn’t recognize the new song, but Kim clearly does.

Some kind of chorus kicks in and Kim starts singing along, winking at Trini and dammit, dammit, dammit. “ _Forever young_ ,” she sings, moving her hips in _that way_ , you know. “ _I want to be forever young._ ”

Trini chokes on her spit. “What the _fuck._ ”

Kim winks. “Don’t you want to be forever young?”

“I hate you,” Trini says, but she’s laughing. Jesus, she’s laughing so hard. “I want to be old, that’s what I want.”

“Well, you got your wish because you’re fucking _ancient,_ ” Kim says. Trini locates an empty can of some cartoonish energy drink and throws it at her. Kim doesn’t even try to duck, so it bounces off her forehead. She’s laughing, hair illuminated in a soft halo that makes her look like some kind of primordial goddess.

“Maybe forever twenty-one?” Kim presses through her laughter. “Does that sound good to you?”

“Then I could at least drink,” Trini says. “Much preferable to whatever the fuck this is.”

“Psssh, you drink anyway,” Kim says, waving an airy hand. She accidentally slaps Billy in the face. “Oh _shit-_ ,”

Billy rolls over slightly and mumbles something in his sleep that sounds suspiciously like, “bring back the banjos.”

Kim and Trini look at each other, wide-eyed, with the absolute terror of two people who know they’re about to burst out laughing in a car filled with sleeping people. Trini makes an executive decision and hits the brakes.

Kim totally falls on her face attempting to untangle herself from her extremely weird position. They spill out of the car madly, like they’re running out of air. Trini barely has time to snap the door shut before they dissolve into crazed, exhausted laughter. They’re hanging off each other, sinking onto the still-warm asphalt, giggling into the rows of empty apartments. Gravel sticks to Trini’s sweaty palms.

“Oh my God,” Kim says. “Holy _shit_.”

“Let him live,” Trini says. “He misses country music. We all have our flaws.”

Kim laughs harder, runs a hand down her scrunched-up face. Trini’s damn glad that, of all the billions of people in this world who could’ve embarked on this crazy, superhero-esque adventure with her, Kim’s one of them.

They were something, once. A pretty long time ago, long enough that Trini’s almost forgotten the soft look in Kim’s eyes right after they broke apart for the first time, still so close that their breaths synced up by habit, still so tangled that Trini forgot whose pulse was whose.

It was maybe fifteen years, which is a solid, committed relationship for most people, but it feels achingly short to Trini. Practically a one-night stand. Fifteen sweet, short years.

If Facebook still existed, Trini’s status would forever be “It’s Complicated.”

Fifteen years, and then three centuries of dancing around each other, of flirting and Krispy Kreme dates and fighting back-to-back, side-by-side, running smoothly like bits of a machine. Of hands almost being held, gazes almost being met, and words on the tip of Trini’s tongue.

And Trini’s still fucking in love with her. It’s infuriating.

“Let’s go out to that field,” Kim says, pointing to their left. “The boys could wake up and think we left them behind, it would be hilarious.”

Trini knows, just about as well as she knows anything, that the boys won’t be fooled for a second. You spend enough time with someone and you understand that they’ll never leave, that you’re as much a part of them as they are of you. Still, Trini’s spent enough time in the Midwest to enjoy a good field, and she needs to stretch her legs.

She slides off the hood of the car, warmth evaporating from the backs of her legs. At some point in the trip, she kicked off her shoes and she’s barefoot now, little chunks of road sticking into her skin, cold and unfeeling. She turns around and faces Kim, almost as tall as her now that she’s standing up.

Kim is a silhouette against the dim light inside the car. Her legs swing to the rhythm of the song, a beat she can feel all through her body, traveling through the bones of the car like a game of Telephone.

Her socks are scrunched up at her ankles.

“Come on,” Trini says. “Let’s go into the giant field in the middle of the night. What could go wrong?”

Kim pushes herself to the ground. “Don’t be like that,” she says. “Maybe we’ll get abducted by aliens.”

Trini hates her laugh around Kim, a tinny schoolyard giggle. Could she be any more obviously a teenager with a crush?

“Sorry, guys,” she says, pretending to talk to an invisible figure in the distance. “Nobody’s home right now.”

They leave the music running, but they turn it all the way down. They walk into the field, a tranquil dimension of coppery wheat and dirt. It goes knee-high on Trini and a little lower on Kim. The field stretches on forever, like a dumb nineteenth-century poem her English teacher might make her read, talking about melted sunlight and the glory of God and something big and formless that’s supposed to be love.

They wade until they’re drowning in crops that nobody will ever harvest, unless one of the five of them has a secret talent for farming (her money’s on Zach, mostly because she would really like to see him in a wide-brimmed hat please and thank you). When she turns, she can see the road, a little dot on the horizon, the only thing giving off light in fifty or so miles.

“What state are we in?” Kim asks.

“No clue,” Trini says, because what’s the point? It’s just a country, a wide, sprawling country. She doesn’t have time for lines.

“Okay,” Kim says, “just wondering.”

Trini nods because her tongue is heavy and clouds have passed over most of the stars. She’s getting real sick of stars. She should stop looking at them, but she can’t. It’s an addiction.

“It’s just like- what are we even doing?”

Trini idly snaps a stalk of wheat, shearing it between her forefinger and thumb. “Whatever we want.”

“That’s not sustainable and you know it,” Kim says, like she hasn’t spent the past three hundred years learning to skateboard and dying her hair weird colors and going through a long-ass midlife crisis.

“Why do you care?” Trini says. “Sustainability is all about keeping people alive. We’ve got no use for it.”

“But we have a way of life,” Kim says, “and I think we want to keep it up. Imagine Jason without his morning Danish.”

“Well,” Trini says, doing that thing she likes to do where she purposefully misses the point, “one of these days Jason’s just going to have to accept that nobody’s eaten a Danish in like a hundred fifty years.”

Kim takes her hand and Jesus, they haven’t even been granted the dignity of acting like high schoolers because this feels like a very seventh-grade moment. Especially since Trini finds herself worrying about how sweaty her palms probably are from driving for a few hours and has to bite down the urge to wipe her hands on a stalk of wheat.

Kim sits down, pulling Trini along with her, and the wheat is so high that for a moment, all she can see is golden yellow, lit up by the moon. It’s her color, and she’ll always feel safe like this, like her armor’s extended, seeping into the earth, but then the wind parts it as if with a comb and sky breaks into the moment.

“Thanks for stopping,” Kim says. Trini steals a glance, and Kim is looking up, almost obediently. “This is a good field.”

“Probably filled with bugs,” Trini says.

Kim shrugs, fingers digging thin tunnels into the soft dirt. It piles up in frothy mounds at her fingertips. Trini watches, like she always does.

“Remind me again why we broke up,” Kim says, transparent faux-casualty and the adrenaline of a night where it feels like nothing matters. Like a time loop where you just wake up in the morning and everything’s been reset.

Trini’s hands curl into fists. She wants to get angry, wants it so bad. She wants to spit that it wasn’t her idea, and why are they rehashing this now, all this time later, and can she _please_ not use the phrase _break up_ because it sounds juvenile and she doesn’t want to be a child.

She doesn’t, because never in her whole life has she been really angry at Kim. How could she be? It sounds stupid and cliché and like everything Trini hates, but she loves this girl deeply. She’s in a lake and sometimes she forgets she’s even treading water until it comes over her head and she can’t breathe from the swirling pressure and her legs ache. She’ll give everything up for Kim, for Kim’s smile and Kim’s comfort and happiness, and it feels good, like something she’s supposed to do.

“I don’t know,” Trini says and she hears the frank tiredness of her own voice. “You tell me.”

“I don’t have that good of a memory,” Kim says. “It all seems kind of pointless, now.”

It always seemed kind of pointless, but Trini doesn’t say so. She ducks her head a little more so she can drown out the sky with pretty, calming yellow, whole waves of it.

Trini’s a little worried that Kim might try to kiss her, and she’s even more worried that she might let her, so she stands up and hooks two fingers through her belt loop, looking at the ground and nothing else. “We should head back,” she says and starts doing just that. It’s so painfully obvious that she’s running away, and she can’t bring herself to care. She pulled herself from a family of cowards and taught herself to stay.

They return to the car without saying anything. Trini buckles her seatbelt and Kim doesn’t, edging herself back in between Jason and Zach, who have flopped onto each other like a three-dimensional puzzle Trini always got frustrated with as a kid.

Trini starts driving. She doesn’t think of much except for the stupid lyrics of Jason’s (indescribably old) music and how it must feel to vanish.

**Author's Note:**

> part 2 coming soonish


End file.
